userrelGentoo User Relations2011-01-06Christel Dahlskjær
The Gentoo User Relations Subproject offers a point of contact between the
development and user communities.

The Gentoo User Relations project's main function is to act as a facilitator
for the various user focused projects within Gentoo. The project takes the
initiative in soliciting feedback from users and developers, creating surveys
on relevant issues, promoting the distribution to individuals and groups, and
fostering cross-project interaction.

The project also offers a point of contact between the development and user
communities. It looks at ways of keeping advanced users and prospective
developers informed about the development community, and encourages relations
between the two communities.

It is important to note that user-relations' activities are intended to be
proactive rather than reactive -- any specific conflicts or other incidents
are dealt with by other groups; our part is to help reduce their workload by
making such incidents less likely.

What we do

The user-relations project's activities and responsibilities include:

Resolve conflicts where possible, and find creative solutions to them. Help to
work through ongoing conflicts, miscommunication, and other such issues that
affect our relationship with the user community.

Help to turn 'more communication' into 'better communication'.

Understand and appreciate different project types and management styles.

Collaborate with, and where possible learn from, the user community.

What we offer

User-relations acts as a form of umbrella project, providing resources and input
to the projects in its area of responsibility. Some of the things we can do for
projects include:

Arrange cross-project meetings for discussion of issues that affect more than
one participating project.

Develop and carry out user surveys, and other methods for gathering input from
the user community.

Provide a central source of information and resources to make user-focused
projects' jobs easier and more productive.

Overall, we intend to encourage relevant projects to co-operate with each other
and with us. Our main goal is to help projects to do their own jobs by providing
information and support as outlined above, and to represent the needs of the user
community within Gentoo. As such, in our dealings with projects we focus more on
how to achieve their goals, leaving the goals themselves for the projects to
decide on. To this end, we hope to stay objective, and be seen as a facilitator
helping the projects to do what they want to do, rather than an authority
dictating policy to others. We can also act as a single entity to represent all the
participating projects should any of them wish to implement anything that would
need discussion with other parts of Gentoo.

Larry The Cow: Since the Summer of 2006 User Relations have been providing you
with the LTC community project; this includes
larrythecow.org which serves a selection of user blogs. To have your blog
included, drop an e-mail to beandog@gentoo.org. We value greatly the feedback
that this project provides for us.

jmbsvicettoantarusParticipating Projects

Some of the projects and groups with which User Relations are working closely
include:

Gentoo Public Relations

Gentoo Forums

Gentoo Infrastructure

AMD64 (and other) Arch Testers

Gentoo Bugzilla

#gentoo ops

Planet Gentoo

The Overlays Project

Project Sunrise

Developer Relations

Release Engineering

Getting Involved

There are a number of areas in which interested users can contribute to Gentoo:

Gentoo Linux Development team: Prospective developers are encouraged to
become active on bugzilla. The bug
reports are monitored by development recruiters, so start squashing bugs and
you will become noticed.

Gentoo Linux Documentation team: The team provides users with clear and
concise documentation. It is comprised of Technical Writers, Editors/Proofreaders,
and Translators. For more information on joining take a look at the
Gentoo Linux Documentation Policy.

#gentoo IRC Channel: Knowledgeable users are encouraged to come and help
out in #gentoo on irc.freenode.net.

#gentoo-dev-help IRC Channel: Anyone wanting to know more about ebuild
writing and/or Gentoo development is welcome to come and ask in #gentoo-dev-help on
Freenode, where developers and other users are waiting to help.

overlays.gentoo.org: The Overlays project offers social workspaces bringing users
and developers closer together. Providing a testing ground and development sandbox for teams
within Gentoo to collaborate directly with users. Please check out
overlays.gentoo.org and their
project page for more information.

Project Sunrise: provides a starting point for users wishing to contribute to Gentoo,
the project encourages users to write ebuilds and under close supervision the project ensures
that the user contributed ebuilds meet Gentoo QA standards. You can find more information about
Sunrise on their project page.

Contact User Relations

Do you have questions about the Gentoo development community? Do you have a
suggestion to improve Gentoo? Then we'd love to hear them. Send an email to
userrel@gentoo.org or the
gentoo-userrel mailing list, or find
us in #gentoo-userrel on irc.freenode.net.